Article history: Received 16 October 2009 Received in revised form 6 June 2010 Accepted 11 June 2010 Available online 19 June 2010 The paper studies in a simple, Downsian model of political competition the private provision of public goods embedded in a system of democracy and redistributive taxation. Results show that the positive effect of inequality on production of public goods, to which Ol...

This study analyzes the sensitivity of US giving to both business cycle fluctuations and trend growth. With tax revenues as a point of reference, US giving constitutes a relatively stable source of revenue. Total giving is characterized by a business cycle volatility which is comparable to the moderate one of indirect taxes. However, this overall finding is composed of the respective sub-compon...

This paper studies the dynamics by which populations with heterogeneous preferences for local public good provision sort themselves into communities. I conduct laboratory experiments to consider which institutions may best facilitate efficient self-organization when residents are able to move freely between locations. I find that institutions requiring all residents of a community to pay equal ...

Progressive Taxation in a Tournament Economy Not enough is known about the responsiveness of individuals, in particular those who tend to work under different incentives, to changes in marginal tax rates. We ask whether changes in marginal tax rates are less distortionary for workers engaged in a contest. To examine this potential rationale for a more progressive tax code, we first model the ef...

This paper studies the dynamics by which populations with heterogeneous preferences for public good provision sort themselves into communities. I conduct laboratory experiments to consider which institutions best facilitate efficient self-organization when residents can move freely between locations. I find that institutions requiring all residents of a community to pay equal taxes enable subje...

Investments in fiscal capacity—economic institutions for tax compliance—are an important feature of economic development. This paper develops a dynamic model to study the evolution of over time. We contrast a social planner’s investment path with politically feasible paths. Three types of states emerge in the long run: a commoninterest state where public resources are devoted to public goods, a...

i n the past decades, the effect of different tax amendments on various economic issues has been studied. the majority of these studies have avoided considering shadow economy as part of the calculation and analysis, and an issue, which has received little attention, is the relationship between green tax reforms and shadow economy, as for informal labor, which is well-connected to unemployment ...

We investigate the terms of exchange between the legislative branch of the government and an administrative bureau with standard operating procedures. An administrative bureau is a not-for-profit public organisation responsible for the production of a non-marketable good. Such a bureau is tax-financed and the budget appropriations can be linked directly to a verifiable measure of the agency’s p...

underground economy affects important indexes such as formal gdp, unemployment, consumption, production and etc. therefore it is necessary to identify elements and factors which affect underground economy to restrict it. surveys and studies indicate the size of iran’s underground economy is high and taxes, quantity and quality of regulations and performance of formal economy are the important f...

Differential tax analysis is used to show how the optimal mix of inflation tax and direct taxation changes with the relative size of the hidden economy. The larger the relative size of the hidden economy, the smaller the optimal ratio of direct tax to inflation tax. Anecdotal empirical evidence supports this result. JEL Classification: E62, H21, H26, O17.